Posted
by
Soulskillon Wednesday February 12, 2014 @04:44PM
from the now-you're-thinking-with-lasers dept.

sciencehabit writes "As it approaches its fifth birthday, the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a troubled laser fusion facility in California, has finally produced some results that fusion scientists can get enthusiastic about. In a series of experiments late last year (abstract 1, abstract 2), NIF researchers managed to produce energy yields 10 times greater than produced before and to demonstrate the phenomenon of self-heating that will be crucial if fusion is to reach its ultimate goal of 'ignition'—a self-sustaining burning reaction that produces more energy than it consumes."

meh... the "new world order" will be broke soon anyway... what's the point of hoarding a fuckload of cash that isn't worth anything?...unless by "new world order" you mean the chinese government, which has been hoarding gold.

Gold is still only as valuable as people perceive it. Gold as a currency is still a goddamn currency. Sure, it may have utility in the modern age (electronics)..but if half the NWO conspiracy actually happened the shit would hit the fan so to speak.

In an SHTF scenario (in which technology is completely or mostly wiped out..or at least the highest tiers of fabrication) I've always held the belief that gold will be valuable - sure - but goods with actual utility will be much more valuable.

so if you trip over a huge gold nugget after SHTF you'll just leave it?

also, in SHTF scenario, all fiat currencies would be wiped out and unless you had something of real value to barter you would starve... pound for pound, gold has been one of the most highly valued commodies in the world since before the ancient egyptians... no action by any NWO will change that

Salt was more valuable than gold. Many other spices as well. Currency was only useful in cities in ancient times. Cities are working economies - a post economic world would have no use of currency. Barter would be the norm. Possibly with some trade (scheduled exchanges of goods between communities).

The only scenario this is even remotely plausible is one where at least 999 of every 1,000 people died catastrophically and in an equal distribution around the globe (leaving about 7 million people worldwide and

gold was widely valued for jewellery and money long before the age of electronics

Jewelry has no utility, and in those times (my understanding - I could be wrong) the elite/ruling class were the only ones with gold jewelry.

In a really bad scenario I feel there wouldn't be a highly-priveleged "elite" for a period of time. What I mean by that is I don't think many people will be seeking out jewelry - they'll be seeking out food, tools, etc.

I think Fonik nailed it. I didn't even think of spices and salt, but historically there have been a ridiculous amount of wars fought over them. Salt in

Never mind ignition, as big an achievement it'll be. It'll be the engineering challenges of building a fusion power plant that'll bring them unstuck.

I'm keen to see how they're going to cheaply and automatically manufacture, load and position the targets to micron-accuracy in the chamber. I'm also interested in seeing how they're going to engineer the chamber to harvest the energy from the reaction, and to withstand the tremendous punishment it'll have to take, being jackhammered by tiny fusion explosions 10 x a second.

No mod points today, but yeah, I think maintaining precision in the process of capturing power output at the level of several hundred megawatts is going to be interesting. I'm getting up there in years; I've pretty much given up on commercial fusion power in my lifetime.

I just want to know how many first steps they can take, it seems I am always hearing about this first step or that first step

Actually you're misremembering what's alway been the first step. It's just that before taking a second step, one must go halfway and take the first step. But before taking that first step, one must go halfway and take half a step. But before taking that half a step, one must go halfway and take a quarter step. ..

"Not sure if this is a rehash of the same fusion discussion here a few weeks/months ago..."

In part.

The NIF did manage to spark a fusion reaction that actually output more energy than was input to the fuel pellet.

However, it is important to note that it was not more energy than the total input to the system. The energy used to power the lasers was still more than the energy of the fusion reaction. So it wasn't "break even".

the world will not be the same again. Cheap energy, without CO2 pollution. Wow.

Except the fuel is radioactive (tritium), and the fusion creates lots of neutrons that irradiate and structurally weaken everything around them, likely producing more nasty nuclear waste than fission reactors, which were also once predicted to produce energy "too cheap to meter."

Actually it was fusion power that was going to be too cheap to meter but it makes a good story to attribute it to fission plants. The prediction was the product of a marketing executive, not someone with any real knowledge of the science, engineering, finance or commercial operation of any such facility. Makes a great soundbite though, doesn't it?

It will produce more waste by volume, but it will be short lived, much shorter than fission waste with only a little effort in selection of materials. You can find leftover parts from experiments like TFTR that are no longer radioactive because things like activated iron and copper decay quite quickly. The only reason you can still find it though is it is required to be labeled as radioactive waste as long as it has any measurable radioactivity, even if it is less than background or less than newly create

The issue is that the previous management were attempting to achieve ignition through an engineering approach. They assumed that the science was well understood and all they needed to do was tweak the knobs and dials on the laser until they got the result they wanted.

When this spectacularly failed to work there was a change in leadership and the new guys are actually doing experiments rather than just firing the 'ignition' capsule over and over.

Well, it's a little unfair. The problem is that the strong nuclear interactions are totally unwieldy. You can't solve them without giant supercomputers, which are not always up to the task of working on such complicated systems. They used the best models available and figured that a little experimentation would guide them to the right answer. But things turned out not to match the models as well as they had hoped.

Thus, they had to scramble to put together a more rigorous model, which is what has been transl

If this keeps up, the magnetic fusion guys, who achieved break even (ignition) decades ago, are going to start crashing NIF press conferences so they can get noticed. The NIF press push and lack of discussion of the field as a whole has got to drive them crazy. I'm sure it's not doing any favors for their budgets.

The best performance of a tokamak I know of was the JET run back in the 90s where they got about 22MJ out of plasma in about 1.5 seconds, a rate of 15MW for that time. It was nowhere near "ignition", it took significantly more energy to create that plasma than it emitted while it lasted.

The NIF people talk about "ignition" because that's what they do, it's in their name after all. Magnetic fusion people talk about Q factor. Q=1 is breakeven where the same amount of fusion energy is produced as is pumped in to make and heat the plasma. I think the best Q figure JET has ever achieved is about 0.6 and only for a very brief time.

The ITER tokamak under construction on France is expected to return values of Q > 10 eventually, with 50MW input producing more than 500MW of thermal energy in a fusion plasma that can be sustained for hundreds of seconds and hopefully it won't have to be rebuilt after every run.

Nobody really knows since nobody's ever got a significant amount of fusion to work for long enough to figure out the gas mileage, so to speak.

The golden chalice is deuterium-deuterium (D-D) fusion which can be done with just heavy water, D2O which is expensive but abundant (it makes up about 1 part in 40 million of water molecules), it just has to be separated out from regular water using centrifuges or other processes. Assuming a lot of fusion power plants are built then there would be be cost savings per tonne of deuterium produced the same way uranium mining and processing is a lot cheaper today than it was during WWII. D-D fusion is hard though.

The easier road to fusion is deuterium-tritium, so-called D-T fusion but tritium is only produced in small amounts in nuclear fission reactors. There is a way to produce tritium in a working fusion reactor by using a blanket of lithium to absorb neutrons but it's very experimental and unproven. ITER is being built in part to test the idea of Li breeding of tritium and it's likely JET will also be used to test the concept, it's being repurposed as a materials testbed for ITER.

...D2O which is expensive but abundant (it makes up about 1 part in 40 million of water molecules)...

That 1 part in 40 million figure, while not wrong, is misleading.

Quoting Wikipedia:

It [duterium] has a natural abundance in Earth's oceans of about one atom in 6,420 of hydrogen.

So the hydrogen in the ocean is 1/6420 deuterium. Getting two of the deuteriums into one molecule is rare, but we don't really care. Chemical bonds are unimportant energetically compared to nuclear reactions.

I did specify D2O as being 1 part in 40 million, not DHO which is a lot more common. Deuterium for plasma fuel needs to be reasonably pure at the moment, it's one of the things the ITER program is tasked with, to see just how crappy the deuterium:hydrogen ratio in fuel can be and still produce good Q levels and burn times. This will reduce the cost of producing fuel in the long run.

I don't think JET ever reached Q of 1, but it can handle the most energy dense fuel of any current tokamak (The JET Q of 0.6 is still ~100x larger than NIF). However, a Japanese tokamak did reach Q of 1.25 in the mid 90s, and it wasn't something guys in the field I knew talked about as a problem by the late 90s.

There's a big challenge in getting the energy out of a fusion reactor. There are parts of a reactor which need to collect energetic particles so they could even theoretically produce power. This s

I have a vague recollection the Japanese tokamak you mention (the JT-60?) was running on D-D fuel and they calculated that if they had used D-T they'd have got Q>1 but it wasn't set up to run with tritium. A moral victory if not a real achievement. The Japanese are in the ITER consortium and the JT-60 is being rebuilt and upgraded as part of the total research effort, like JET at Culham.

ITER is being built right now and the designers believe it will give them several hundred seconds of 500MW of thermal e

On that train all graphite and glitterUndersea by railNinety minutes from New York to Paris(More leisure time for artists everywhere)A just machine to make big decisionsProgrammed by fellows with compassion and visionWe'll be clean when their work is doneWe'll be eternally free yes and eternally young.

What the NIF is all about is compressing D-T fuel by radiation pressure and finding out what kind of profile of the radiation pressure pulse has the highest yield. That's exactly what you do when you want to get a bigger bang out of the nuclear weapons you have, because your NATIONAL DICK isn't big enough yet to properly display your "patriotic" manlihood to the rest of the world that you feel like you have to dominate completely in order to feel like you've accomplished something.

What the NIF is all about is compressing D-T fuel by radiation pressure and finding out what kind of profile of the radiation pressure pulse has the highest yield. That's exactly what you do when you want to get a bigger bang out of the nuclear weapons you have, because your NATIONAL DICK isn't big enough yet to properly display your "patriotic" manlihood to the rest of the world that you feel like you have to dominate completely in order to feel like you've accomplished something.

What did you expect? The funding, building and research the NIF does is provided by the DoD. The primary interest IS to find ways to increase yield on weapons. The fact that the research can also be used towards civilian energy interests is a pleasant bonus.

Unfortunately, doing science like this has to be done under the auspices of other interests or it doesn't happen. Things like alternative fuels, climate change, etc., are happening under the DoD because of it. (Yes, climate studies are done because they're of vital interests to maintaining security. And alternative fuels as well as not having to rely on diesel trucked in has strategic interests - considering by the time it's all said and done, the fuel cost is around $400/gallon. Not counting lives lost)

Hell, any science done that isn't in a nation's interest is also cut. E.g., Canada cut funding to scientists with "inconvenient" topics (like pollution, fish habitat protection, environment, climate change) because they went against let's go sell oil around the world damn the earth mentality.

I would be much less upset if this wasn't being called a fusion power project, because it simply isn't. And it hurts the credibility of the very real fusion power projects out there that can actually be scaled to be what they claim to be. NIF is just going to be yet another example people will hold up when they claim that fusion power is a sham and shouldn't be funded.

So, let's get this straight. This is the FIRST STEP???? You guys have been at this for decades and have spend millions if not billions in the quest for "clean energy" and this "first step" is all we have to show for it? Besides cranking up a bunch of lasers all at once every now and again, what, exactly have you been doing?

I seem to recall a story about fusion just a few months ago that said "We are only a decade or two away from FREE energy!" Fusion, it's Coming!!! etc. Pardon my skeptic bent, but I think we should skip to the chase on what's really going on and get an answer to the REAL question.

How much money do you guys need now?

I'm all for research, but lets not fool ourselves. We are not even close on this one. We might be barking up the wrong tree with this and I think we should double down on our investment and start another group to try some different ideas if there are any. So perhaps we should half the last contribution and solicit some other bright folks to do some research with the other half.

We know how the physics of fusion works. What they are really trying to do now is design a cost-efficient device. That's an engineering task, not a task for physicists, and they don't seem to be very good at it.

If you look at this result, billions spent to achieve a neutron flux that theoretically contains slightly more energy than a theoretical number grabbed out of a hat, it's useless and a gigantic waste of money. They are as far away from energy production as ever.

Then do as you say and you'll find out you're wrong. Example: Castle Bravo had a yield of 15 megatons, 10 of which were fission, only 5 were fusion. This is a common feature of actually weaponized "hydrogen" bombs and most of those devices tested by the US somewhere down in the Pacific where they didn't care what happened with the fallout.

The Soviets, on the other hand, realized that since they had to test on their own territory, they best reduce the fission yield of their test devices as much as possible t

It's at best 5 times better. (21MeV from fusion of H-2 and H-3 vs. 200MeV from fission of U-235 or Pu-239). But since you won't use pure tritium and deuterium, and instead something like partially tritated lithium deuteride, where you breed your tritium from lithium in-situ, the ratio drops further to something like a factor of 3. In terms of volume (which is important for MIRVs), you'll find that using uranium is in fact *better* by a factor of 3 to 5.

The GP was correct. The vast majority of weapons that were actually built obtained most of their yield from fission. The exceptions were mainly tests and oddities like neutron bombs.

You don't get any fusion yield without surrounding it with something heavy to squeeze it, so the weight of the actual fusion fuel is irrelevant. They figured that if they needed something heavy in the bomb anyway, it might as well be uranium because that gave 2X to 3X the bang for free.

It's not that simple. The energy released by fusion is mostly in the neutrons, which aren't so good at converting to heat and blast. Our nukes are fusion boosted fission weapons as the AC and tp1024 stated. They are dirty, radiological weapons by design. Read:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/... [fas.org]

It's a good idea and, like all good ideas, somebody already had it. It's called subcritical reactor [wikipedia.org]. But it's nuclear fission technology and so, as usual in the last two or three decades, nobody really gives a shit.

Fission fusion hybrids have been thought of. Unfortunately you tend to get all the problems of both - the fusion part is still expensive, while the fission means you still have a big decay heat problem to deal with.

H-Bomb employ's fusion ignition, however the uranium fission is the destructive force behind the weapon. This will allow them essentially to turn the ignition of a thermonuclear weapon into the actual weapon, and much more destructive and compact.